Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple targets car production by 2024, eyes ‘next level’ battery tech: sources

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 699 posts

Re: Apple targets car production by 2024, eyes ‘next level’ battery tech: sources

#501

Post by natch »

foxtr0t wrote: post #366
natch wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The engine of my electric car has one moving part. One. Made in house from raw materials. Rolls of steel, copper, and aluminum. It’s also considered a single part for manufacturing and servicing purposes. So not simply one moving part. One part, period. >The number of parts/unit differs by an order of magnitude >car companies often rely on hundreds of suppliers See above. You must be thinking of ICE cars. >aren’t as…

I was waiting for the Muskians to swoop in and spread their nonsense. Guess what? I drive a white model 3 long range AWD and I love it. I'm still 1: an engineer with 10 years of hardware experience and 2: skeptical of every ounce of BS Elon Musk has ever spread. You know how many parts are under the car? Have you taken one apart? They're complicated machines with, again, orders of magnitude more parts than a phone. F…

> Guess what? I drive a white model 3 long range AWD and I love it. I'm still 1: an engineer with 10 years of hardware experience and 2: skeptical of every ounce of BS Elon Musk has ever spread.

0) Blue P3D AWD + Blue 3 AWD 1) 30 2) Right there with you, but that is a red herring.

It would have been sufficient to clarify that you held the opinion even about electric cars, without the histronics and name calling. You may be right, because cars certainly are complex.

Re: Apple targets car production by 2024, eyes ‘next level’ battery tech: sources

#502

Post by RealityVoid »

agumonkey wrote: post #380
foxtr0t wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite becoming more similar in recent years, the cell phone supply chain is still very different than the automotive supply chain. The number of parts/unit differs by an order of magnitude and so does the size and weight, not to mention manufacturing techniques and materials. These are capabilities, not so much skills, and they aren't as transferable as you may think. For instance, logistically things are very diff…

Are you sure an EV is still that much more complex in terms of part count from a phone ? An ICE I would agree.

I can assure you that only in the instrument cluster and the central console area you have the same amount of complexity as in a smartphone. Now add the rest of the car.

Re: Apple targets car production by 2024, eyes ‘next level’ battery tech: sources

#503

Post by regimeld »

sixQuarks wrote: post #112
buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I feel that Apple management, and its shareholders, have no idea what it means to build a car I feel like people pretend that building a car is way harder than it actually is in 2020. All the components to build a car are readily available. A person can buy the parts on their own and put them together in their garage. It isn't like they have to go get a pick axe and start mining ore to create everything from sc…

Elon Musk, the guy responsible for sending humans to the space station, a feat that has only been matched by the largest governments, stated that building modern auto manufacturing is harder than building rockets.

Yup. Apple is closer to Ford and GM than it is to Tesla. Tesla is highly vertically integrated, and probably moving more so. Apple is much less vertically integrated. They design their products, but all their manufacturing is like others -- kinda like Ford and GM.

Re: Apple targets car production by 2024, eyes ‘next level’ battery tech: sources

#504

Post by Supermancho »

finnh wrote: post #43
abhinavsharma wrote: post #21

This is starting to make increasingly more sense even though Apple making a car seemed laughable a few years ago. Apple is fundamentally now a company that can move immense amounts of capital into new industries with the underlying ethos of user experience. Apple Card was perhaps a dipping of the toes moment. In theory, Tesla shouldn't be worth what it is because the tech behind it is increasingly getting commoditize…

> Apple is fundamentally now a company that can move immense amounts of capital into new industries with the underlying ethos of user experience. Also: insane supply-chain management chops, a skill that is more and more transferable - especially for electric cars.

> a skill that is more and more transferable - especially for electric cars.

What does that matter?

There are Car manufacturers that have basically had infinite capitalization and funding for a decade and the legal system + technology barriers just didn't move. Supply chain was never an issue.

Apple's not going to see any different results, so I am puzzled by this optimism.

Re: Apple targets car production by 2024, eyes ‘next level’ battery tech: sources

#505

Post by gamblor956 »

ajross wrote: post #467
gamblor956 wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla's biggest threat isn't Apple. It's the other automakers making enough EVs that they don't need to purchase credits from Tesla anymore. Tesla is profitable, but every single one of its quarterly profits is still the result of selling credits to other automakers, not from the sale of its cars. In that regard, Tesla joins such luminous counterparts as Fiat (1.4 million profit on accounting charge) and Hyundai ($14…

That credits thing doesn't seem to add up. A quick google shows that 7% of Tesla's 2019 revenue was selling credits. While sure, that's of the same order as the profit, you can't make an argument that "all" of the profit was credits for basic fungibility reasons. "All" of the profit could be any 7% chunk of revenue. And 7% is like half a year of profits growth in this cases for a company that is still growing rapidly…

It's "literally all" of the profit because Tesla controls the timing and amount of credits sold each quarter, and adjusted the sales of credits so that it could make the "4 consecutive quarters" profitability threshold for making the S&P500 rather than selling them all in one quarter as they did in the past.

Profits are not fungible. Companies can, and do, determine profit and loss separately for each line of business, because it matters both for financial reporting purposes and for tax purposes. Even Tesla acknowledges that it is not profitably making and selling cars under GAAP (i.e., under industry-standard accounting); their unit margin deliberately excludes items that would normally be ratably allocated to each unit. Hell, Tesla even fired most of its marketing department and cut its marketing budget so that it could goose the financial metrics it needed to make the S&P.

In that sense, it worked. Tesla is on the S&P. The downside to being on the S&P though is greater scrutiny and more price friction. Tesla can no longer count on retail investors to goose stock prices with marketing stunts.

Re: Apple targets car production by 2024, eyes ‘next level’ battery tech: sources

#507

Post by bob33212 »

bitexploder wrote: post #324
abhinavsharma wrote: post #21

This is starting to make increasingly more sense even though Apple making a car seemed laughable a few years ago. Apple is fundamentally now a company that can move immense amounts of capital into new industries with the underlying ethos of user experience. Apple Card was perhaps a dipping of the toes moment. In theory, Tesla shouldn't be worth what it is because the tech behind it is increasingly getting commoditize…

I tell everyone I view Tesla as a software company first and that their tech was a decade ahead of other car makers. I think it will still take another 5-8 years for a traditional automotive manfacturer to get close. Apple, they could do it.

Tesla is a Manufacturing company for energy and transportation. It just happens that doing those things well requires you to have 10x better software teams than other companies including older car or even tech companies.

Re: Apple targets car production by 2024, eyes ‘next level’ battery tech: sources

#508

Post by yazaddaruvala »

adrr wrote: post #351
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #271

Apple, will not make a car. They will make carOS, the UX that is built into other companies' cars. Basically, they will build software, the steering wheel, the whole from dash, maybe even a backseat interface, and internal software (excluding hardware drivers), and standardize the UX across every automaker. Kinda like what Android did for phones, but Apple will enforce stricter regulations for carOS.

Apple isn’t a software company. They are a hardware company that focuses on software to showcase their hardware. They are the opposite of Microsoft which is a software company that makes hardware to showcase their software. I can’t even run the later safari on a non apple product.

Apple isn’t a software company and it isn’t a hardware company. Apple is a merchant of “good will”[1]. It does this by creating then selling long term trust. In the words of Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, “we build products because we love them” and “we build products we would recommend to our friends and family”.

Today Apple has the luxury to be exclusive. When they didn’t, they released iTunes and Safari on Windows. Today they are even becoming a “health company”. Don’t be surprised when Apple starts to create implants and prosthetics.

All this to say, Apple will do whatever they want as long as it has product market fit and they can be proud of having built it.

[1] good will - as it is defined by capitalism and consumerism, not in an ethical sense. Including pretending/trying to be ethical when it aligns with capitalistic “good will”.

Re: Apple targets car production by 2024, eyes ‘next level’ battery tech: sources

#509

Post by nbzso »

I will walk, bike or buy a horse before give another penny to this people. Management chops, supply-chain, massive scale. Are we so blind that allow big tech to exploit abroad, avoid taxes, buy politicians, kill any prospect of middle class, accumulate tons of user data and prepare level of automation and surveillance non existent in history? Apple car will be like iPhone, closed, with low repairability, with restricted user experience and every goddamn shady legalised practice that they can think off. Trillion dollar companies shape a future in which you will not "own anything and be happy". What is this nightmare?

Re: Apple targets car production by 2024, eyes ‘next level’ battery tech: sources

#510

Post by _underfl0w_ »

mulmen wrote: post #150
the-dude wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was he as a boss?

I liked working for him. I don’t understand this question. It reads like my comment could be interpreted in some other way than I intended but I can’t figure out what that would be.

The implication is pretty overt, no? Asking OP to explain almost seems deliberately obtuse.

You mentioned, in a decidedly technical forum, that a superior at work made a somewhat questionable tech-related decision by owning a car with dashboard software by a company whose software is commonly joked to crash frequently and be less-than-reliable. I'm sure it was purely in lighthearted jest, but not exactly subtle given context. I'm sure your boss was/is a nice person.

Post reply on HN